


Change

by rivendellrose



Category: Babylon 5
Genre: Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-27
Updated: 2019-02-27
Packaged: 2019-11-06 07:10:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17935193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rivendellrose/pseuds/rivendellrose
Summary: Mayan returns to Babylon 5 after Delenn's transformation, and finds herself avoiding her old friend.





	Change

**Author's Note:**

> This could be read as AU, given that as far as canon is concerned we only know that Mayan visited B5 twice, both times in the first season, first in "The War Prayer" and then again (off-screen) in "Eyes." This fic posits a third visit, at the beginning of the second season. 
> 
> Written for [babylon5_love](https://babylon5-love.dreamwidth.org/) on DW.

When they were young, Delenn had always been the quiet one, the timid and shy one who needed reassurance and feared doing or encountering new things. 

_How different we are now_ , Mayan thought as she walked through the strange and winding corridors of Babylon 5, avoiding the turn-off toward her old friend's quarters for the fourth time since her arrival on the station. _I know the way, but my feet refuse to follow. My mind continually makes excuses, finding one reason and another to walk in another direction and delay, delay, delay the moment of meeting again the most familiar person in my world, and finding her changed._

If she had written it herself in a poem, she might have thought it a good literary device, but in reality, it was highly unnerving. Most of all because it required admitting that she was genuinely afraid to see her oldest friend again. Afraid of her own reaction, true, but also...

_Perhaps she will not want to see me._

And there was the worst of it -- the shiver of embarrassing, horrifying _hope_ that was raised by that thought. Hope that when she finally worked through her own fears, Delenn would not be there in her quarters, that her aide would turn Mayan away with polite but meaningless words about duties and obligations and how very busy she was with the business of being the Minbari ambassador to this place, and how sorry Delenn would be to have missed her, but it simply could not be avoided. Her trip was so short, she would surely not have time to try again before the ship back home was to leave, and then she could carry on with a clear conscience, knowing that, well, she had tried her best, hadn't she? They both had. But their lives both were very different now than they had been as children and young women, and perhaps, after all, it was to be expected that, having gone in such wildly different directions with their paths in life, they could not find the time to be as intimate as they had once been.

So much easier, to think all of that, than to admit that Mayan was quaking inside at the thought of being in the same room and feeling an aching gap between them, a rift that could never be healed. The thought had lingered in Mayan's mind ever since she heard of the decision that Delenn had made, the choice to take prophecy into her own hands and make of herself something other. Something that Mayan feared she would not recognize... or, worse yet, that she would indeed, and would see in her oldest and dearest friend now the shape of the people who had attacked and branded her. It was enough to have to see the guards who had been assigned for her protection during the duration of the visit hovering around her, watching her as much as they watched everyone around her. She had made it her mission to be polite, to treat them with a blend of distant friendliness and benevolent condescension that had served her well with the less desirable of her audience members in the past, but mostly she wished they were warriors of her own kind. Those, she would not have felt quite so unprepared to deal with, and would not have felt so much need to pretend interest in the design of the station, or the items laid out on a merchant's tray in the Zocolo. A detachment of Minbari warriors would not have concerned themselves with wondering why Shaal Mayan was delaying in her errand by wandering aimlessly about the station. Such thoughts would be beneath them, and therefore she would be safe from the strain of constant pretense. 

_They don't want to be here with you anymore than you want them here_ , she thought to herself as she caught one of the women stifling a yawn and a glance at a chronometer. _This honor guard is Delenn's doing, her way of showing you honor without deigning to make an appearance herself._ Back in the old days, they would have met each other at the transport station after even the brief absence of a holiday away from temple, not sent guards to meet the other at the gate...

"Mayan!" 

She freezes, and in this moment she is too frightened to turn around. She would know that voice anywhere, but she knows, too, that the creature calling to her with it is no longer the girl she grew up with, not entirely. It is not her precious Delenn anymore, but a half-stranger who many say is no longer even Minbari. 

The moment stretches, and Mayan feels it like the long and yet short pause before stepping onto a stage. There is a time, there, before the first eyes are on her, where she feels loose and unmoored, as if she could forget all her training and her practice, as if decades of singing _teela_ in front of audiences will wash away and she will be once again the student who first stood in front of a group of strangers and felt as if the hard-won words would stay bottled up inside her forever. 

Then she did what she always did, took a deep breath, and stepped out into the light -- only this time it was turning, and meeting just the one pair of eyes that have always mattered most.

"I'm so glad that I happened on you here," Delenn continued as time started up again. "I was afraid I would be trapped in that abysmal council meeting until you had already gone to bed, and not be able to speak with you before your transport leaves tomorrow morning."

She was changed. Her coloring, the shape of her face, the beautiful crest minimized and covered beneath long, dark Human hair, all made Mayan's body tense with discomfort. She couldn't stop looking at the way the strange, pink skin crept up the lower edges of Delenn's crest, or the way the shape of her brow bone had eased back, making her eyes look shallow and unshielded. And the hair -- what possible purpose could such stuff serve? How annoying it must be to manage it day after day, and the way it hid the beautiful blue triangle at the top of her skull... 

"Was your journey difficult? You seem tired." Delenn's eyes -- oh, but those _were_ still hers, the same sea-green eyes that Mayan had envied so much when they were young! -- narrowed slightly, and she tilted her head in that way she'd always had when something struck her. "Or worried? Nothing has happened again, has it--"

"No, nothing." With an effort, Mayan smiled and held out her hands. "I am only tired, as you said -- this tour has been long, and it will be good to get home in a few days, and sleep in my own bed for a while, and rest before I begin to work on new compositions again."

"You haven't already?" Delenn's lips quirked in a mischievous smile. "I have never known you not to be working on _something_..."

"Well, only a few jotted notes. Impressions. I cannot really compose while I travel. Not well, anyway."

"Then I am not keeping you from your work, and I insist that we go back to my quarters and take tea together. That will help you to feel more like yourself."

The hand that folded Mayan's own into her elbow was almost the same as the one she remembered -- still small and soft and warm and familiar -- but their posture, here, was strangely reversed. Almost always, in the past, she had been the one to tuck Delenn's hand into her own elbow or wrap it in her fingers. _I was right to think she had grown braver than me. Or that I've grown cowardly..._

As they walked, Mayan snuck sideways glances at her friend, measuring the difference and similarities until, with one look, she found Delenn watching her, too. Unfamiliar color rose on Delenn's cheeks, but she held the gaze in a way that was unmistakably her own, and Mayan remembered suddenly all the times when timid, gentle young Delenn had turned out to have a spine of steel that her brash and loudmouthed friend had never quite expected. "The change is not so great you don't know me anymore, is it, Mayan?"

Proud as she was of her skills as a performer, Mayan could not be surprised that her facade had failed against Delenn. Delenn had seen her build up her performance slowly, over decades -- of course she knew how to see through it, through her, right to the quivering, grasping core of herself. It made her feel small, and naked, but also deeply ashamed of how she had feared for her own feelings on seeing her dear friend, forgetting entirely what _Delenn_ would be feeling at such a strange and difficult time.

"Of course not." Mayan slipped her hand down Delenn's sleeve to knit their fingers together, and squeezed. "I would know you anywhere, any time, in any life."


End file.
